Reviewed by Tina Mozelle Braziel and James Braziel
Walt Whitman contains multitudes, and so does Salaam Green’s debut collection The Other Revival: Poems & Reckonings (Pulley Press 2025). A certified listening poet, Green put her vast skills to work at the Wallace House in Harpersville, AL as a poet-in-residence, interviewing descendants of the enslaved and enslavers of the former plantation. From these interviews she drafted poems using the Pulley Method, developed by Pulley Press, that prompts poets to discuss drafts inspired by interviews with the interviewees and make any requested adjustments. The Other Revival draws from 17 such interviews.
Her collection in The Other Revival also gives voice to the challenges Green faced as a black woman working a former plantation house and to the experiences of an enslaved woman identified as the woman in the yellow apron. It also features poems about another place that commemorates this history, the History House, the first home to be owned by a black family in Shelby County, a house that now holds artifacts and heirlooms celebrating the resilience of the enslaved and their descendants. The collection closes with a collection of quotes from descendants and biographical information about them. Even the title, The Other Revival, evokes a large tent where all are welcome to come bear witness and find healing.
“The Ancestors want me to write to them, not about them” is the opening line to the poem, “The Air Upstairs at the Wallace House Has a Perfume of Saving Grace,” and embodies the heart of the collection. To give voice to multitudes Salaam acknowledges——no, more than that——she addresses the past by writing “the silhouette of their bodies back into form,” the form of poems. But Salaam’s poems don’t just work in one direction, for she is also writing to, acknowledging, and addressing us, so that we might find our way to the past, individually and collectively, so that we might begin to look at the past in ways we haven’t.
In “The Woman in the Yellow Apron as Medicine,” we hear, “The Medicine Mother is a balm to the land,” and “Touch is her medicine.” In “Redeeming a Relic——Reclaiming a Storied Past” (a poem inspired by an interview with Nell Gottlieb, written using the Pulley Method) we hear, “This is the house of the living,” for the past is always alive. And in “What I Didn’t Expect in Harpersville,” (a poem inspired by an interview with Daniel Boatner V., written using the Pulley Method) we hear how——
Coming to Alabama taught me
to be solemn and wild
Stepping onto slave land as they called it,
the heat stirred up my ancestors’ rivers
I came across a self I didn’t expect I could become
and siblings who raised food in farmland
broken by cotton gins
the speckle of God’s grace left in Alabama
calling each other kin
those who risk coming home,
who narrate the reclaimed
land and find healing.
To find grace, to find healing, requires that we step onto the land and into the plantation house, requires our presence and our attendance. Again and again in The Other Revival, Salaam gives us the map of how to do this, so that we might be one of “those who risk coming home,” to face hard truths, yes, but also joy and kinship, so that we can learn how to tend to the past like we would our own gardens. The multi-voiced nature of this collection makes room for us to cultivate our experience, our inherited history, to speak, to make connections, to create meaning from the folks and their conversations that Green faithfully and poetically conveys to us. It asks us to become part of the conversation by considering our role in this history and how we can become part of the necessary healing. As Green says “this revival returns us back to who we are and have always known ourselves to be – African, Beautiful, Human, Awakened, Reimagined, Rural, Love.”
The Other Revival is a beautiful and generous gift, from a gifted poet who has many written collections-worth of poetry from her personal experience. We’ve heard Green read poems about reading the newspaper with her grandfather and another where Earth is a pink prom dress hung in her mother’s closet; they are poems we want to read and reread in print. But this, Green’s first collection, a work of poetry, history, and ethnography, is essential reading for Alabamians, Southerners, and all Americans. It is map of how we can go beyond reconciling ourselves with exploitation and abuse of the past and find ways to heal, repair, and learn how to tell our stories. She invites us to join that revival, to listen like she has that history, to its descendants, and when we speak to remember how “talk is communion— / a new revival.”
Salaam Green
Salaam Green is the inaugural poet laureate of historic Birmingham, Alabama 2024-2026. She is the founder of Literary Healing Arts and is a certified Listener Poet and Artist in Residence with the University of Alabama at Birmingham Arts in Medicine program and Wallace Center for the Arts. A native of Greensboro, sheholds an English degree from the University of Montevallo and a Master’s in Early Childhood Education from the University of North Dakota.
Leave a Reply